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Bike – Security Upgrades

Security on a motorcycle has been a great debate with my family. Although I truly understood their point of view and their fears in particular, I still wanted to go around the globe on a motorcycle. There are many reasons for this decision. The most important is closely related to my family’s apprehensions: you are vulnerable to your environment when you ride a bike. Now this may seem like a weird thing to say, but vulnerability is a good thing. Riders know that being on a motorcycle and driving a car can accomplish the same purpose, but not through the same journey. Instead of looking through the glass at the environment, you are actually part of it when you ride. You hear the sounds around you, your engine, tires on the road, Hobbler effect of passing cars; smell nature, smog, farming activities, burning fire, poorly adjusted engines and feel the temperature differences, humidity level, bugs you hit on the way. When you get in a new place, you most likely look way less dangerous, probably poorer than a new comer in his geared up SUV. You have the freedom to hit small trails, cross deep rivers in a small boat.

In my desire to still be as secure as possible, I upgraded a few things on the bike:

Alarm System:

I do not want to write too much about this one. Let’s just say it’s loud and can detect pretty much any activity on or around the bike. It sends a warning to a remote control that I will have on me in case of trouble.

Visibility:

I added an LED tail light that also splits when flashing. It works well at warning the driver behind me. For the front, I changed the headlight light bulb to a whiter version and added a set of very powerful LED auxiliary lights from Baja Design. They are great!

Aux lights installed

Low beam

High beam

LED’s ON + Low beam

Horn:

Stock horn sounded like a scooter horn that could not even be heard from a standard sedan I was following in rural Canada. There is no way I would have been heard from a transport truck in third world countries. I replaced it with a PIAA slim unit.

New horn installed

Barbusters:

Stock handguards were made out of plastic. I opted for an aluminum sub-frame version with wider coverage from Barkbuster. I am hoping the aluminum bar will hold better on a crash. The supplied mounting brackets could not fit with the bike, so I purchased two bicycle front derailleur brackets from my friend Robert at Hobby Cycle. They did the trick just fine.